Salaries, appelate jurisdiction and judges performance: the case of Mexican administrative courts

Abstract

In Mexico up to this day there is a debate on whether administrative judges should earn more money; or whether administrative courts should incorporate appellate jurisdiction to better guarantee accountability of the administration. The answer to these questions has not been accompanied by any empirical evidence on whether these variables influence in some manner Mexican administrative judges’ performance. In this paper we try to answer the questions of whether judge’s salaries or the existence of appellate jurisdiction influence judges’ performance. As a federation with federal jurisdiction and local jurisdiction, Mexico has 29 state administrative courts. The design of each one of these courts varies depending on the State to which they pertain. Among these variations it can be identified a variety of salary ranges and procedural designs. There has been a long and complex debate on the ideal wage for judges. On the one hand there are scholars that have found no relationship between salaries and judges’ performance. On the other hand judges, as rational agents, might prefer to work less when earning low wages and more when earning high wages. Regarding appellate jurisdiction there are also opposite views on the subject. There are opinions that maintain that appellate jurisdiction on administrative courts is a waste of resources because judges’ performance is not affected by the review of their decisions. On the contrary, there are some other opinions that identify in appellate jurisdiction a way of constraining judges’ performance. Again, judges as rational agents might work less when having no direct monitoring of their decisions than when having it. With the data used in this paper, the conclusion is that these two variables do affect judges’ performance. Specifically we found that the decision on whether to review or not an administrative act when litigated is a function of judge’s wages and the existence of appellate review on judges’ decisions.

En México ha existido durante mucho tiempo un debate acerca de si los jueces deben ganar más dinero o acerca de si las cortes deben contar con una instancia de apelación. Ninguna de las respuestas dadas a estas preguntas ha sido acompañada por un análisis empírico del problema. En el presente documento tratamos de responder a la pregunta de si estas variables afectan el desempeño de los jueces de carácter administrativo en México. México se organiza como una federación en la que existen materias federales y materias locales. La jurisdicción administrativa local corresponde a cada una de las entidades federativas y cada una decide la constitución y el correspondiente diseño de su órgano jurisdiccional administrativo. En el sistema local mexicano existen una variedad de rangos de salarios para los jueces administrativos y existen algunas cortes con instancia de apelación incluida y otras sin instancia de apelación. Con los datos analizados en este trabajo concluimos que aquellos jueces que ganan un mayor salario tienden a trabajar más que aquellos jueces que ganan un menor salario. Asimismo, aquellos jueces que trabajan en cortes con instancia de apelación tienden a trabajar más que aquellos que jueces que trabajan en cortes sin instancia de apelación.